The Symbolism of Poetry

by William Butler Yeats

[] All sounds, all colours, all forms, either because of their preordained energies orbecause of long association, evoke indefinable and yet precise emotions, or, as I preferto think, call down among us certain disembodied powers, whose footsteps over ourhearts we call emotions; and when sound, and colour, and form are in a musicalrelation, a beautiful relation to one another, they become, as it were, one sound, onecolour, one form, and evoke an emotion that is made out of their distinct evocationsand yet is one emotion. The same relation exists between all portions of every work ofart, whether it be an epic or a song, and the more perfect it is, and the more variousand numerous the elements that have flowed into its perfection, the more powerfulwill be the emotion, the power, the god it calls among us. Because an emotion doesnot exist, or does not become perceptible and active among us, till it has found itsexpression, in colour or in sound or in form, or in all of these, and because no twomodulations or arrangements of these evoke the same emotion, poets and painters andmusicians, and in a less degree because their effects are momentary, day and night andcloud and shadow, are continually making and unmaking mankind. It is indeed onlythose things which seem useless or very feeble that have any power, and all thosethings that seem useful or strong, armies, moving wheels, modes of architecture,modes of government, speculations of the reason, would have been a little different ifsome mind long ago had not given itself to some emotion, as a woman gives herself toher lover, and shaped sounds or colours or forms, or all of these, into a musicalrelation, that their emotion might live in other minds. A little lyric evokes an emotion,and this emotion gathers others about it and melts into their being in the making ofsome great epic; and at last, needing an always less delicate body, or symbol, as itgrows more powerful, it flows out, with all it has gathered, among the blind instinctsof daily life, where it moves a power within powers, as one sees ring within ring in thestem of an old tree. This is maybe what Arthur O'Shaughnessy meant when he madehis poets say they had built Nineveh with their sighing; and I am certainly nevercertain, when I hear of some war, or of some religious excitement or of some newmanufacture, or of anything else that fills the ear of the world, that it has not allhappened because of something that a boy piped in Thessaly. I remember once tellinga seer to ask one among the gods who, as she believed, were standing about her intheir symbolic bodies, what would come of a charming but seeming trivial labour of afriend, and the form answering, "the devastation of peoples and the overwhelming ofcities." I doubt indeed if the crude circumstance of the world, which seems to createall our emotions, does more than reflect, as in multiplying mirrors, the emotions thathave come to solitary men in moments of poetical contemplation; or that love itselfwould be more than an animal hunger but for the poet and his shadow the priest, forunless we believe that outer things are the reality, we must believe that the gross is theshadow of the subtle, that things are wise before they become foolish, and secretbefore they cry out in the market-place. []

IIIThe purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment ofcontemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment ofcreation, by hushing us with an alluring monotony, while it holds us waking by variety, tokeep us in that state of perhaps real trance, in which the mind liberated from the pressure ofthe will is unfolded in symbols. If certain sensitive persons listen persistently to the ticking ofa watch, or gaze persistently on the monotonous flashing of a light, they fall into the hypnotictrance; and rhythm is but the ticking of a watch made softer, that one must needs listen, andvarious, that one may not be swept beyond memory or grow weary of listening; while thepatterns of the artist are but the monotonous flash woven to take the eyes in a subtlerenchantment. I have heard in meditation voices that were forgotten the moment they hadspoken; and I have been swept, when in more profound meditation, beyond all memory but ofthose things that came from beyond the threshold of waking life.I was writing once at a very symbolical and abstract poem, when my pen fell on the ground;and as I stooped to pick it up, I remembered some phantastic adventure that yet did not seemphantastic, and then another like adventure, and when I asked myself when these things hadhappened, I found, that I was remembering my dreams for many nights. I tried to rememberwhat I had done the day before, and then what I had done that morning; but all my waking lifehad perished from me, and it was only after a struggle that I came to remember it again, andas I did so that more powerful and startling life perished in its turn. Had my pen not fallen onthe ground and so made me turn from the images that I was weaving into verse, I would neverhave known that meditation had become trance, for I would have been like one who does notknow that he is passing through a wood because his eyes are on the pathway. So I think that inthe making and in the understanding of a work of art, and the more easily if it is full ofpatterns and symbols and music, we are lured to the threshold of sleep, and it may be farbeyond it, without knowing that we have ever set our feet upon the steps of horn or of ivory.

IVBesides emotional symbols, symbols that evoke emotions alone,--and in this sense all alluringor hateful things are symbols, although their relations with one another are too subtle todelight us fully, away from rhythm and pattern,--there are intellectual symbols, symbols thatevoke ideas alone, or ideas mingled with emotions; and outside the very definite traditions ofmysticism and the less definite criticism of certain modern poets, these alone are calledsymbols.[]

VIf people were to accept the theory that poetry moves us because of its symbolism, whatchange should one look for in the manner of our poetry? A return to the way of our fathers, acasting out of descriptions of nature for the sake of nature, of the moral law for the sake of themoral law, a casting out of all anecdotes and of that brooding over scientific opinion that sooften extinguished the central flame in Tennyson, and of that vehemence that would make usdo or not do certain things; or, in other words, we should come to understand that the berylstone was enchanted by our fathers that it might unfold the pictures in its heart, and not tomirror our own excited faces, or the boughs waving outside the window. With this change ofsubstance, this return to imagination, this understanding that the laws of art, which are the2

hidden laws of the world, can alone bind the imagination, would come a change of style, andwe would cast out of serious poetry those energetic rhythms, as of a man running, which arethe invention of the will with its eyes always on something to be done or undone; and wewould seek out those wavering, meditative, organic rhythms, which are the embodiment ofthe imagination, that neither desires nor hates, because it has done with time, and only wishesto gaze upon some reality, some beauty; nor would it be any longer possible for anybody todeny the importance of form, in all its kinds, for although you can expound an opinion, ordescribe a thing, when your words are not quite well chosen, you cannot give a body tosomething that moves beyond the senses, unless your words are as subtle, as complex, as fullof mysterious life, as the body of a flower or of a woman. The form of sincere poetry, unlikethe form of the "popular poetry," may indeed be sometimes obscure, or ungrammatical as insome of the best of the Songs of Innocence and Experience, but it must have the perfectionsthat escape analysis, the subtleties that have a new meaning every day, and it must have allthis whether it be but a little song made out of a moment of dreamy indolence, or some greatepic made out of the dreams of one poet and of a hundred generations whose hands werenever weary of the sword."The Symbolism of Poetry" by William Butler Yeats first appeared in The Dome, April 1900,and was reprinted in Yeats's Ideas of Good and Evil, 1903.Source: http://grammar.about.com/od/classicessays/a/yeatssymbolismessay.htm

THE LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,And live alone in the bee-loud glade.And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;There midnight's all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow,And evening full of the linnet's wings.I will arise and go now, for always night and dayI hear the water lapping with low sounds by the shore;While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,I hear it in the deep heart's core.

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyreThe falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity.Surely some revelation is at hand;Surely the Second Coming is at hand.The Second Coming! Hardly are those words outWhen a vast image out of Spiritus MundiTroubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desertA shape with lion body and the head of a man,A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,Is moving its slow thighs, while all about itReel shadows of the indignant desert birds.The darkness drops again; but now I knowThat twenty centuries of stony sleepWere vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?